Social Good

10 Easy Ways to Green Your Web Site

The Internet uses vast amounts of energy — one Google search reportedly requires enough energy to boil a cup of water. However, the web is slowly but steadily "going green." The trouble is this means different things to different people. As more ways to lighten your web site's environmental footprint are found, it becomes increasingly difficult to choose the combination of steps that is right for your business.

There are lots of reasons to green your web site. They range from economical to moral. Since not all energy is renewable and clean, we all have an obligation to go a bit greener.

Here are 10 of the most common and effective ways to green your web site.

1. Environmentally Friendly Web Hosting

This is by far the biggest step you can take to green your web site. Web hosting servers consume immense amounts of energy to keep them running 24/7. As this industry grows, many web hosts are clamoring to establish themselves as green web hosting providers. Eco Host Reviews is the original green web hosting resource and can help distinguish between legitimacy and greenwashing.

Green web hosting typically involves several of the following elements:

Beyond these things, companies can do more. But these five are the most common steps web hosts take to "go green."

2. Offset Your Carbon Usage

Step one is getting your site green certified by CO2Stats.com. Step two is offsetting your web site's energy usage completely. This will essentially negate your site's impact on the environment, though it is important to make the distinction between offsetting a carbon footprint and not having one at all.

Companies like CO2Stats will "offset" your dirty energy use by contributing a proportionate amount to a program that will remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere or insert renewable energy into the grid equal to your non-renewable energy usage. The program also claims to drive traffic to your site and help you improve its energy efficiency.

3. The 350 lbs. Project

BrighterPlanet has launched a program called The 350 Challenge. Any blogger can sign up by placing a badge on their web site. Once you notify them, they will offset 350 lbs. of CO2 on your behalf. This is a free and super-easy process.

This program is geared towards bloggers, starting with a goal of 350 blogs (hence the name). They shattered this goal within a month and now have signed up over 1,600 blogs, equivalent to 122,500 lbs. of carbon removed from the atmosphere. If you do nothing else to green your blog, do this.

4. Join 1% For the Planet

One way to show that extra commitment to the environment is to join 1% For the Planet. This program is for companies who commit to donate 1% of their profits to environmental programs. This is done through a certified list of recipients. With 1,908 non-profit programs receiving funding from 1,128 companies worldwide, this program is really taking off.

Giving 1% is a big commitment but sends perhaps the biggest message to your readers. To date, this program has given $50 million to environmental non-profits.

5. Offer Eco-Incentives to Subscribers

Getting subscribers, followers and return visitors is hard. One way to both green your web site and encourage visitors is to combine the two by offering an eco-incentive. This could be as simple as planting a tree for each subscriber or offsetting a given amount of CO2 for each Twitter follower.

To plant a tree for a subscriber, visit the Arbor Day Foundation. To offset carbon emissions for each reader, visit the Carbon Fund web site. Be creative, think of a small but meaningful step you can take in exchange for getting more readers for your web site.

6. Encourage Green Lifestyle Changes

Whether your blog is about the environment or the stock market, you have the power of information. You can encourage users to take steps to decrease their environmental impact, to set their computer to run more efficiently, and many other tips.

7. Simplify Your Design

Each server request takes energy on both ends. The larger the transfer, the more energy consumed. Simple designs can be elegant and effective. You can also decrease your web site's energy usage by posting fewer images with lower resolution, using fewer JavaScript widgets, and using less resource-intensive technology, like Flash. This will decrease load time and server requests.

Simplifying your site is not only eco-friendly, but user friendly as well. Some of the most popular blogs have very simple and user-friendly designs.

8. Speed Up Your Site

Search engines value speed. But slow sites also take up more energy. Not only does every server request consume energy, the more time people spend waiting for your site to load, the more energy is consumed.

9. Use Printer-Friendly Versions of Content

With the advent of smart phones and social networking, printing is becoming less necessary, but your visitors may occasionally need to print your posts out. Most content management systems and blog software offer plugins that will create a printer friendly version of your content, which saves on ink and paper in the long run.

This usually means erroneous graphics are removed and content is converted to text-only. Colors are removed (to use less ink), text is converted to serif fonts, links are underlined, font size is shrunk and navigation items are removed. Some sites also remove their advertising (or put in specific advertising like Mapquest.com does) and remove all JavaScript and other invisible coding.

10. Consider Your Colors

Computer monitors use energy to display colors. The older CRT monitors used more energy to display lighter colors like white (which explains the dark design of the Google alternative Blackle), but newer LCD monitors use more energy to display dark colors like black.

Because of the widespread use of LCDs, the darker the color of your web site, the more energy it will ultimately use. Designing your site with a lot of white space may be helpful. Although each page load may only save a small amount of energy, over the long-term, it adds up.

Conclusion

Whatever combination you choose, visitors will appreciate your environmental efforts. None of these efforts will change the world alone, but every small step matters. It is estimated the IT industry generates about 2% of the world's CO2 emissions, equivalent to the entire airline industry If we all change our habits slightly, the impact will be significant.

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